Re:I don't have an organ donor card
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Only those people who cannot be brought back to a fully conscious life. That, to me, seems to be a safe and conservative boundary. The life is lost anyway.
The other people on the waiting list will be very grateful.
This sentence mostly shows just how little you know about transplantation. The problem is not the amount of organs, but whether a donor can be found with a compatible immune system. For any given recipient, it is extremely rare that there is more than 1 good donor, likewise most available organs are never used for anything. This would be true even if everybody donated organs.
It is frightening how strong an opinion people can have when being ill-informed to such a degree.
So no, nobody on the list will be grateful in the least. If there is an organ that would match me, chances that it will match someone else needing an organ are tiny. So nobody will be grateful.
If you were terminally ill and could only be saved with an organ from the victim of a traffic accident, would you refuse? If not, then stop being a hypocrite.
Oh great, hyperbole. If you were terminally ill and could get better if you just had the doctors kill some unknown homeless person, would you ? Some mentally retarded kid ? Some usually comatose old guy ? A black woman perhaps ? An infidel ? A republican ? A communist ? There's plenty of people who argue those lives to be less than worthwhile. "If not, then stop discussing."
And for the record, if I was not sure about the circumstances in which said organ was taken, yes, I would refuse. For one thing, why would my life be worth more to the doctor than that of the guy they cut open for the organ in question ?
It is cool to see just how strongly people respond to even remote incentives. Your case obviously pretty much settles the argument in favour of not signing a donation card, and yet people keep arguing instead of congratulating you. It is extremely great that your father survived.
The fact that medical professionals lied to you, or at the very least withheld information also settles whether or not doctors can be trusted with this decision. I have also had experience with medical professionals nonchalantly withholding information, then claiming afterwards it's not a big deal. I am not even saying that what they did was out of malice, or financially motivated. Even the mere fact that mistakes happen would be more than enough arguments for any rational human to refuse to sign a donor card. Which is the right decision.
I wonder how much of the opposition to your case is motivated because some people feel entitled to your organs, and your father's.
No, try reading the rest of the thread. I was talking about severe brain trauma in the context of the scenario of OP, who spoke about being brain-dead. The brain changes constantly, and my brain tomorrow won't be the same as my brain today, that hardly means I think I deserve to die tomorrow. I am not suggesting we kill everyone who loses the ability to juggle as the result of a major concussion. I just think that if we start replacing parts of the brain of a person with severe brain-trauma to a degree where the resulting person is pretty much indistinguishable from someone who has had a complete brain transplant (if such a thing were possible) we've abandoned 'curing the patient' and crossed into mad-scientist 'create new life' territory, and we're still using the body as an organ donor, but we're donating all the organs to the new person.
That would be a reasonable argument if and only if doctors were able to make this determination. We have very little information on what brain injuries one can recover from, and which are fatal. You say so yourself, they have no such ability.
Meanwhile there's several known cases of people who have recovered from braindead. It is *not* a certainty that harvesting organs does not kill an otherwise viable person, just a statistically likely event.
So the only moral argument to be made is that of the "greater good", and we all know where that argument leads.
I don't have an organ donor card
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I find it most offensive that you somehow find it "moral" to claim a right on my organs. Let's see if you reciprocate : can I cut out your heart ? You claim a right on mine, so why can't I have yours ?
How about younger children where killing an older person might save them (killing = the older person doesn't agree) ? What about a rich person needing a heart and a poor person "not having a liveable life anyway ?". What about a politically desirable individual needing one ?
I would not be able to live with a "donated" organ that was taken under the conditions you seem to think give you a right to kill other people.
You're merely pointing to a propaganda site. Regardless the choice is not about donating or not donating organs, but it is about having someone else decide to donate *your* organs.
Incidentally, I find nothing about that little detail on the site you mentioned.
The problem here, of course, is not so much that the body is beheaded, but that there is a connectivity problem in the autonomous nervous system. It is often unclear what this problem is, exactly, and how it affects perception of the person inside the brain. It is likewise unknown what the chances of recovery are, except that they're statistically relatively small. It is not known how small exactly. We don't really know all that much about the connections between the brain and the autonomous nervous system. The only certainty is that most of it (except the eyes) goes through the brainstem, and most (not all) functions that we consider a human originate in the cortex. So what's really going on in a BHC is a lack of signals traversing the corpus callosum.
So sadly, the worst is true : it varies from : 1) it doesn't affect perception at all ("locked in syndrome"). Usually, but not always, the eyes will still exhibit autonomous functions. if you are a donor, you best pray to high heavens this doesn't happen to you 2) the person really is dead, and no perception will occur. Sometimes the eyes are nevertheless open and partially functional.
Of course, the real world is even more complex than this, people have been known to recover fully from both cases. Both from locked in syndrome and from braindead state. This is rare, but due to organ donations being commonplace for nearly as long as we actually have figures, it is not actually known how rare.
In both cases, doctor's neither kill the patient directly, nor administer anaesthetics, because both may cause deterioration in the organs to be transplanted. It is thus a very real possibility that there is one case of a patient being cut apart while fully aware on a yearly basis in America.
The real problem with signing a donor card is that it takes away the decision from everyone involved, and delivers it into the hands of people whose only incentive does not have anything to do with your condition. If you sign that thing, doctors have permission (and a strong incentive) to cut you apart the moment you are declared braindead. Given the incentives, it is feared that this even affects the decision to declare a patient braindead. But the worst, imho, is that the choice is taken away from both the person, and from their loved ones, who would normally have to give the go-ahead (presumably after being convinced doctors have done all they can, which would be a safeguard). The problem with this is that it often takes time to contact next of kin, and during that time doctors have to watch perfectly good organs deteriorate and fail.
I would never sign that card, and if it becomes opt-out I'd opt-out immediately. My wife is perfectly aware that I would be willing to donate my organs, and she makes the decision, simply because I trust her with it. If I sign that paper, there's no telling who that decision gets transferred to. If that means my organs die, well too bad. Without consulting me or someone I trust to make that decision on my behalf, nobody has any right whatsoever to my organs.
The sad part is that in order to harvest organs, the hippocratic oath was modified (just as it was modified to remove the restrictions forbidding euthanasia and abortus). It is very sad that we have exactly zero respect for the contract that gave us modern medicine. What people don't realize is what happened with medical knowledge in ancient Greece before the hippocratic oath, and how badly it affected society (someone basically went to the local doctor for a good poison to murder someone else in more than a few stories). But hey we see a quick buck (for doctors) or a quick organ (for patients) and bye-bye oath. I am of the opinion that one day normal people (you, me, the poor in general) will thorouglyregret that. (btw yes, second link is morality-preaching obama-bashing nonsense, scroll down to the paper and read it. I have looked for a direct link, not found one)
The exact same argument is often made for "real" programs being windows-only.
If that's the kind of world you support, then of course you're right.
You can also see that Google is doing what it can to fix this, and so there's a good chance this will get fixed, even if maybe not tomorrow. You want perfect google support, it's clear which devices to buy. This year's model is the galaxy nexus. It's a great phone.
That's of course true for some apps, but not really for games that depend only on finger input and 3d rendering. Monoculture greatly reduces support costs is one of the few true arguments that Microsoft made in support of it's windows-office platform.
The same is true on the windows platform for games. We only have high-production 3d games for windows + xbox and ps3 these days, because you can do that coding against directX and 1 gpu. The other platforms, including at the moment ios, just get scraps.
So you want to not commit the crime of copyright infringement and instead go for the trio : 1) purposefully deceiving law enforcement 2) accessory to copyright infringement (same as linking to copyrighted content) 3) fraud (towards other downloaders, and copyright owners, granted not much chance of enforcement here)
And of course, you want to generally be a dickhead, breaking the bittorrent protocol, sabotaging others for your own advantage. And of course, this might be a viable strategy for a few people, but the more people do this, the less viable it becomes. Of course, large amounts of people helping is just what bittorrent depends on.
I work at a company that does lots of work in python, and the level of frustration with it is astounding. Lots of people *are* implementing important stuff in python, and it's always greeted with much enthousiasm, and even more sighing. You see, python is slow. Due to how we work it takes about 3 seconds to start a python program (we basically use a pip + virtualenv clone that allows you to take the fully downloaded virtualenv and package it into an executable file), which is not much but irritating as hell. And iterating through a large dataset takes ages.
The same routine, one that basically downloads a few tens of megabytes from the nearest datacenter was rewritten in C++. Why ? It's speed was about 2.6 MB/s (over a gigabit network). The C++ version was about 62 times faster (and faster inside the datacenter, where the rtt was much lower). And we have a java version that's also more than 50 times faster.
While it wasn't impossible to optimize the python version, that made it ugly, and even our best optimizers couldn't get it above about 15 MB/s.
"Language speed doesn't matter" - Sure it does. It basically makes it impossible to use your language for a big range of tasks. And it's such a shame. Python is a great language, strongly typed, with coding conventions that basically say "you must assign with static types", and structured in a way that almost all code can be compiled. And imho, what gives python it's power is the __* functions. It's much more like C++ with garbage collection than most people realize.
Well you're right. But I didn't say it would be fully functional, just functional-style.
It's not just SSA form. That was the first such transformation getting implemented, a few years ago. These days it has a few brothers. It's also rewriting functions and loops into new forms that allow for vectorization. As for memory not being SSA, sadly that pretty much requires garbage collection. I've seen at least one compiler that does do that though.
Simulating first-class functions is simple. There's 2 obvious ways : either you use macros (sadly, often done), or you pass along the variables needed.
Lazy evaluation is another thing gnome often simulates. It works in the java version. Basically you return a function instead of just the answer, complete with the "who's going to free() this" problem.
Compiling functional languages down to C is extremely simple. Functional code is imperative, it's just accepting the rule that you can never reassign a variable. It's the reverse that's hard.
But just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not done. Pretty much every C compiler with the partial exception of gcc compiles C code into a functional-style imaginary assembly-like language, because that allows more optimization algorithms to work. It's hard and complex, but it gains you a few percent of efficiency.
Most high-level programming languages easily "compile down" to C, in a straightforward and easy manner. Just look at the gnome source code to recoil in horror at the manual, convoluted and incomplete reimplementation of C++'s virtual method tables. Complete with the "your destructor isn't virtual" gotcha just waiting to bite you, except without the compiler warning when you do screw it up. Or the linux kernel's way of dealing with all sorts of datatypes, like a file handle. It *is* object-oriented, both gnome and the kernel, they just prefer to compile manually.
Want to give C "all the power of python" ? Just make all variables part of a huge dictionary, and do everything with symbolic lookups. ( x.y(z) => (*dict_get(dict_get(global, "x"), "y")) (dict_get(global, "z")), and all types reduced to "void *". There's people who actually do stuff like this (like, again, gnome).
The new linux iptables code looks like an extremely basic lisp implementation, because they know how to make that fast. The previous one looked like an interpreter for an extremely convoluted language (much slower because of the 2 strands of execution : first the interpreter itself, second the actual rules being executed. This hinders cache efficiency a lot).
Going down is never the problem. Compiling any highlevel language down to C is an easy exercise (I won't go as far as to say it's trivial, it's not). Imho it's not the best option. C is hard to optimize (but code is available to do that), so compilers necessarily miss a lot of opportunities. The compiler actually has to determine the programmer's intention, prove difficult properties about portions of code, before a lot of optimizations can be applied. Needless to say, this is very hard. Dataflow oriented languages, by contrast, are much easier to optimize and beat C in performance. But nobody knows them, and so actually coding such a compiler is a very hard, very lonely exercise.
It's of course true that the real world was not designed for "crime". But here's something all Christians, all other religions and atheists agree on : the real world doesn't care about laws either. Whenever you do anything in the real world, arguably, you set in motion a chain of events that totally ignores the law. It may even be your intention to respect the law, yet the chain of events violates the law anyway. This leads to the "involuntary" crimes. There are even passive crimes, where you commit a crime if you don't do something, like not helping a person in moral peril. If it's illegal, it will work just as fine as legal actions. So what may happen, what's the big difference ? You may get caught.
That's the situation they're trying to create on the internet by -at least partially- de-anonymizing it : increase the chances of getting caught for obvious violations of copyright.
There's 2 problems for the copyright holders : 1) anonymity : users know they can't be tracked, and well, read a few slashdot comments, you'll soon understand that people do things anonymously they wouldn't do with their reputation on the line 2) the price of the legal apparatus. This is the reason for the ridiculous claims. Since these cases have a 1 - in 1000 chance of getting to collection, and opening a case (without a lawyer) costs about $500 (it varies depending on state, country, and so on, but as a ballpark figure it's not bad...). So that means a successful case must pay half a million dollars just so it's not a loss for a (big) copyright holder. In practice, they *do* take a loss, even on the high-profile ridiculous damages cases. (given that 2 basically makes things impossible for a copyright holder, even massive ones like disney or nbc and the like, they have only one other hope : that the fate of the "unlucky" victim scares others into compliance, so that the income from the increased legal sales covers the legal expenses and provides some profit too)
Please keep in mind that it's not just huge multinationals getting damaged here. There used to be many people surviving on shareware products, remember ? Look up a few articles on why some of them quit.
The way the internet works right now, only advertising supported content, or highly specialized content can survive in the long term. Do you really want that ?
Yeah just like the presence of real world objects means nothing can be done about crime in the real world.
The idea is to make it impossible to anonymously share things on the internet. Then you'll have the same situation in the real world, and the same laws that apply.
Let's not leave out the credit to all those other religions, who did the much, much worse. What makes Christians unique is that they managed to hold back enough for science to be conserved and even improved upon.
Read Jared Diamond's book to see just how bad things are. Whether we're talking muslims, buddhists, mayans, Incas, or whatever the religion on the pacific and Indian ocean islands were called. Each and every one managed to destroy close to every last iota of written text they could get their hands on. Some, like the mayas and muslims, got quite far... and then destroyed their progress. Even atheist states aren't innocent in this regard, as ancient athens at one time voted on the order to destroy every book that claimed objects sometimes move in a straight line (only circular trajectories were allowed). Likewise they voted several times to destroy mentions of particular parts of history.
The Christian world by contrast, even in the dark ages, was covered in Libraries containing much more than just the bible, and this was maintained by Christian monks. Even more unique amongst the world's religions : they actually copied non-christian works verbatim, even where they disagreed with canon. This was obviously mentioned in commentaries, but they didn't rewrite the books like muslims did (for example, so did hindus and buddhists). Some muslims go so far as to say that the version from muslim scolars from the middle ages are "really" the original versions.
Some western scholars hold that even the quran itself is such a very badly copied book, a copy of the bible, made in a language of the early companions of the prophet. These guys then proceeded to get nearly all of themselves killed in wars they started, resulting in the stupid fact that they didn't have anyone who spoke the original language (Arameic) the book was written down in. Then they transliterated, picking whatever word was the closest arabic word in a systematic manner, the result of which was written down. Some stories do indeed match word-for-word with ancient eastern bibles, but it is often hard to find these things, because they re-ordered the sentences (from long to short), and left >95% of them out entirely (which is why the quran is such a short and horribly unreadable book). See also, Christopher Hitchens.
Sadly, when it comes to religions, Christians are the top of the line. Which of course doesn't mean that they're particularly supportive of science, just that they can usually resist the apparently very strong human temptation to burn, kill or crucify anyone remotely suspected of having independent ideas.
Well, yes. But the hypothesis that on 1 Jan 1990 God has decreed that the temperature shall henceforth stay constant is still a better match than the IPCC's prediction for the last 20 years (by the extremely standard squared error method), as specified in the report they released in that year. I fully agree it's not a very realistic scenario, and I'm not proposing adopting that as a weather model. But that's not really the point. The point is that the IPCC's AR1 prediction is flat-out wrong. It predicted X (a fairly massive temperature increase), and Y (much less rise than predicted 1990-2000, barely any rise 2000-2010) happened. The basis for the Kyoto accord is bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Only those people who cannot be brought back to a fully conscious life. That, to me, seems to be a safe and conservative boundary. The life is lost anyway.
The same can be said about the old guy, the poor guy and about political undesirables. Hell, the same is said about young children with a mild mental handicap. (and that's not the only paper advocating such a viewpoint)
The other people on the waiting list will be very grateful.
This sentence mostly shows just how little you know about transplantation. The problem is not the amount of organs, but whether a donor can be found with a compatible immune system. For any given recipient, it is extremely rare that there is more than 1 good donor, likewise most available organs are never used for anything. This would be true even if everybody donated organs.
It is frightening how strong an opinion people can have when being ill-informed to such a degree.
So no, nobody on the list will be grateful in the least. If there is an organ that would match me, chances that it will match someone else needing an organ are tiny. So nobody will be grateful.
If you were terminally ill and could only be saved with an organ from the victim of a traffic accident, would you refuse? If not, then stop being a hypocrite.
Oh great, hyperbole. If you were terminally ill and could get better if you just had the doctors kill some unknown homeless person, would you ? Some mentally retarded kid ? Some usually comatose old guy ? A black woman perhaps ? An infidel ? A republican ? A communist ? There's plenty of people who argue those lives to be less than worthwhile. "If not, then stop discussing."
And for the record, if I was not sure about the circumstances in which said organ was taken, yes, I would refuse. For one thing, why would my life be worth more to the doctor than that of the guy they cut open for the organ in question ?
It is cool to see just how strongly people respond to even remote incentives. Your case obviously pretty much settles the argument in favour of not signing a donation card, and yet people keep arguing instead of congratulating you. It is extremely great that your father survived.
The fact that medical professionals lied to you, or at the very least withheld information also settles whether or not doctors can be trusted with this decision. I have also had experience with medical professionals nonchalantly withholding information, then claiming afterwards it's not a big deal. I am not even saying that what they did was out of malice, or financially motivated. Even the mere fact that mistakes happen would be more than enough arguments for any rational human to refuse to sign a donor card. Which is the right decision.
I wonder how much of the opposition to your case is motivated because some people feel entitled to your organs, and your father's.
No, try reading the rest of the thread. I was talking about severe brain trauma in the context of the scenario of OP, who spoke about being brain-dead. The brain changes constantly, and my brain tomorrow won't be the same as my brain today, that hardly means I think I deserve to die tomorrow. I am not suggesting we kill everyone who loses the ability to juggle as the result of a major concussion. I just think that if we start replacing parts of the brain of a person with severe brain-trauma to a degree where the resulting person is pretty much indistinguishable from someone who has had a complete brain transplant (if such a thing were possible) we've abandoned 'curing the patient' and crossed into mad-scientist 'create new life' territory, and we're still using the body as an organ donor, but we're donating all the organs to the new person.
That would be a reasonable argument if and only if doctors were able to make this determination. We have very little information on what brain injuries one can recover from, and which are fatal. You say so yourself, they have no such ability.
Meanwhile there's several known cases of people who have recovered from braindead. It is *not* a certainty that harvesting organs does not kill an otherwise viable person, just a statistically likely event.
So the only moral argument to be made is that of the "greater good", and we all know where that argument leads.
I find it most offensive that you somehow find it "moral" to claim a right on my organs. Let's see if you reciprocate : can I cut out your heart ? You claim a right on mine, so why can't I have yours ?
How about younger children where killing an older person might save them (killing = the older person doesn't agree) ? What about a rich person needing a heart and a poor person "not having a liveable life anyway ?". What about a politically desirable individual needing one ?
I would not be able to live with a "donated" organ that was taken under the conditions you seem to think give you a right to kill other people.
You're merely pointing to a propaganda site. Regardless the choice is not about donating or not donating organs, but it is about having someone else decide to donate *your* organs.
Incidentally, I find nothing about that little detail on the site you mentioned.
"In the year 2013 reality triumphed over every form of political ideology. It did the same in every other year"
--oelewapperke
The problem here, of course, is not so much that the body is beheaded, but that there is a connectivity problem in the autonomous nervous system. It is often unclear what this problem is, exactly, and how it affects perception of the person inside the brain. It is likewise unknown what the chances of recovery are, except that they're statistically relatively small. It is not known how small exactly. We don't really know all that much about the connections between the brain and the autonomous nervous system. The only certainty is that most of it (except the eyes) goes through the brainstem, and most (not all) functions that we consider a human originate in the cortex. So what's really going on in a BHC is a lack of signals traversing the corpus callosum.
So sadly, the worst is true : it varies from :
1) it doesn't affect perception at all ("locked in syndrome"). Usually, but not always, the eyes will still exhibit autonomous functions.
if you are a donor, you best pray to high heavens this doesn't happen to you
2) the person really is dead, and no perception will occur. Sometimes the eyes are nevertheless open and partially functional.
Of course, the real world is even more complex than this, people have been known to recover fully from both cases. Both from locked in syndrome and from braindead state. This is rare, but due to organ donations being commonplace for nearly as long as we actually have figures, it is not actually known how rare.
In both cases, doctor's neither kill the patient directly, nor administer anaesthetics, because both may cause deterioration in the organs to be transplanted. It is thus a very real possibility that there is one case of a patient being cut apart while fully aware on a yearly basis in America.
The real problem with signing a donor card is that it takes away the decision from everyone involved, and delivers it into the hands of people whose only incentive does not have anything to do with your condition. If you sign that thing, doctors have permission (and a strong incentive) to cut you apart the moment you are declared braindead. Given the incentives, it is feared that this even affects the decision to declare a patient braindead. But the worst, imho, is that the choice is taken away from both the person, and from their loved ones, who would normally have to give the go-ahead (presumably after being convinced doctors have done all they can, which would be a safeguard). The problem with this is that it often takes time to contact next of kin, and during that time doctors have to watch perfectly good organs deteriorate and fail.
I would never sign that card, and if it becomes opt-out I'd opt-out immediately. My wife is perfectly aware that I would be willing to donate my organs, and she makes the decision, simply because I trust her with it. If I sign that paper, there's no telling who that decision gets transferred to. If that means my organs die, well too bad. Without consulting me or someone I trust to make that decision on my behalf, nobody has any right whatsoever to my organs.
The sad part is that in order to harvest organs, the hippocratic oath was modified (just as it was modified to remove the restrictions forbidding euthanasia and abortus). It is very sad that we have exactly zero respect for the contract that gave us modern medicine. What people don't realize is what happened with medical knowledge in ancient Greece before the hippocratic oath, and how badly it affected society (someone basically went to the local doctor for a good poison to murder someone else in more than a few stories). But hey we see a quick buck (for doctors) or a quick organ (for patients) and bye-bye oath. I am of the opinion that one day normal people (you, me, the poor in general) will thorougly regret that. (btw yes, second link is morality-preaching obama-bashing nonsense, scroll down to the paper and read it. I have looked for a direct link, not found one)
the xoom
Because apple has started using microsoft/facebook tactics and pays people loads of money to badmouth google ?
And yet, the PC (intel/amd + windows) is the only platform "serious" games are getting developed for. I think you're missing something.
The exact same argument is often made for "real" programs being windows-only.
If that's the kind of world you support, then of course you're right.
You can also see that Google is doing what it can to fix this, and so there's a good chance this will get fixed, even if maybe not tomorrow. You want perfect google support, it's clear which devices to buy. This year's model is the galaxy nexus. It's a great phone.
That's of course true for some apps, but not really for games that depend only on finger input and 3d rendering. Monoculture greatly reduces support costs is one of the few true arguments that Microsoft made in support of it's windows-office platform.
The same is true on the windows platform for games. We only have high-production 3d games for windows + xbox and ps3 these days, because you can do that coding against directX and 1 gpu. The other platforms, including at the moment ios, just get scraps.
For games, this seems to be a big point.
Suuuuuuure
So you want to not commit the crime of copyright infringement and instead go for the trio :
1) purposefully deceiving law enforcement
2) accessory to copyright infringement (same as linking to copyrighted content)
3) fraud (towards other downloaders, and copyright owners, granted not much chance of enforcement here)
And of course, you want to generally be a dickhead, breaking the bittorrent protocol, sabotaging others for your own advantage. And of course, this might be a viable strategy for a few people, but the more people do this, the less viable it becomes. Of course, large amounts of people helping is just what bittorrent depends on.
You might lose a bit of popularity ...
I bet Chuck Norris could drive a car into the stratosphere.
Murphy took them all out and put them in the servers.
I work at a company that does lots of work in python, and the level of frustration with it is astounding. Lots of people *are* implementing important stuff in python, and it's always greeted with much enthousiasm, and even more sighing. You see, python is slow. Due to how we work it takes about 3 seconds to start a python program (we basically use a pip + virtualenv clone that allows you to take the fully downloaded virtualenv and package it into an executable file), which is not much but irritating as hell. And iterating through a large dataset takes ages.
The same routine, one that basically downloads a few tens of megabytes from the nearest datacenter was rewritten in C++. Why ? It's speed was about 2.6 MB/s (over a gigabit network). The C++ version was about 62 times faster (and faster inside the datacenter, where the rtt was much lower). And we have a java version that's also more than 50 times faster.
While it wasn't impossible to optimize the python version, that made it ugly, and even our best optimizers couldn't get it above about 15 MB/s.
"Language speed doesn't matter" - Sure it does. It basically makes it impossible to use your language for a big range of tasks. And it's such a shame. Python is a great language, strongly typed, with coding conventions that basically say "you must assign with static types", and structured in a way that almost all code can be compiled. And imho, what gives python it's power is the __* functions. It's much more like C++ with garbage collection than most people realize.
Well you're right. But I didn't say it would be fully functional, just functional-style.
It's not just SSA form. That was the first such transformation getting implemented, a few years ago. These days it has a few brothers. It's also rewriting functions and loops into new forms that allow for vectorization. As for memory not being SSA, sadly that pretty much requires garbage collection. I've seen at least one compiler that does do that though.
Simulating first-class functions is simple. There's 2 obvious ways : either you use macros (sadly, often done), or you pass along the variables needed.
Lazy evaluation is another thing gnome often simulates. It works in the java version. Basically you return a function instead of just the answer, complete with the "who's going to free() this" problem.
The problem with C# (and most microsoft languages) is the quality of the libraries. It's terrible.
Which is a damn shame, because C# should allow very clever API designs.
Compiling functional languages down to C is extremely simple. Functional code is imperative, it's just accepting the rule that you can never reassign a variable. It's the reverse that's hard.
But just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not done. Pretty much every C compiler with the partial exception of gcc compiles C code into a functional-style imaginary assembly-like language, because that allows more optimization algorithms to work. It's hard and complex, but it gains you a few percent of efficiency.
Most high-level programming languages easily "compile down" to C, in a straightforward and easy manner. Just look at the gnome source code to recoil in horror at the manual, convoluted and incomplete reimplementation of C++'s virtual method tables. Complete with the "your destructor isn't virtual" gotcha just waiting to bite you, except without the compiler warning when you do screw it up. Or the linux kernel's way of dealing with all sorts of datatypes, like a file handle. It *is* object-oriented, both gnome and the kernel, they just prefer to compile manually.
Want to give C "all the power of python" ? Just make all variables part of a huge dictionary, and do everything with symbolic lookups. ( x.y(z) => (*dict_get(dict_get(global, "x"), "y")) (dict_get(global, "z")), and all types reduced to "void *". There's people who actually do stuff like this (like, again, gnome).
The new linux iptables code looks like an extremely basic lisp implementation, because they know how to make that fast. The previous one looked like an interpreter for an extremely convoluted language (much slower because of the 2 strands of execution : first the interpreter itself, second the actual rules being executed. This hinders cache efficiency a lot).
Going down is never the problem. Compiling any highlevel language down to C is an easy exercise (I won't go as far as to say it's trivial, it's not). Imho it's not the best option. C is hard to optimize (but code is available to do that), so compilers necessarily miss a lot of opportunities. The compiler actually has to determine the programmer's intention, prove difficult properties about portions of code, before a lot of optimizations can be applied. Needless to say, this is very hard. Dataflow oriented languages, by contrast, are much easier to optimize and beat C in performance. But nobody knows them, and so actually coding such a compiler is a very hard, very lonely exercise.
It's of course true that the real world was not designed for "crime". But here's something all Christians, all other religions and atheists agree on : the real world doesn't care about laws either. Whenever you do anything in the real world, arguably, you set in motion a chain of events that totally ignores the law. It may even be your intention to respect the law, yet the chain of events violates the law anyway. This leads to the "involuntary" crimes. There are even passive crimes, where you commit a crime if you don't do something, like not helping a person in moral peril. If it's illegal, it will work just as fine as legal actions. So what may happen, what's the big difference ? You may get caught.
That's the situation they're trying to create on the internet by -at least partially- de-anonymizing it : increase the chances of getting caught for obvious violations of copyright.
There's 2 problems for the copyright holders : ...). So that means a successful case must pay half a million dollars just so it's not a loss for a (big) copyright holder. In practice, they *do* take a loss, even on the high-profile ridiculous damages cases.
1) anonymity : users know they can't be tracked, and well, read a few slashdot comments, you'll soon understand that people do things anonymously they wouldn't do with their reputation on the line
2) the price of the legal apparatus. This is the reason for the ridiculous claims. Since these cases have a 1 - in 1000 chance of getting to collection, and opening a case (without a lawyer) costs about $500 (it varies depending on state, country, and so on, but as a ballpark figure it's not bad
(given that 2 basically makes things impossible for a copyright holder, even massive ones like disney or nbc and the like, they have only one other hope : that the fate of the "unlucky" victim scares others into compliance, so that the income from the increased legal sales covers the legal expenses and provides some profit too)
Please keep in mind that it's not just huge multinationals getting damaged here. There used to be many people surviving on shareware products, remember ? Look up a few articles on why some of them quit.
The way the internet works right now, only advertising supported content, or highly specialized content can survive in the long term. Do you really want that ?
Yeah just like the presence of real world objects means nothing can be done about crime in the real world.
The idea is to make it impossible to anonymously share things on the internet. Then you'll have the same situation in the real world, and the same laws that apply.
Let's not leave out the credit to all those other religions, who did the much, much worse. What makes Christians unique is that they managed to hold back enough for science to be conserved and even improved upon.
Read Jared Diamond's book to see just how bad things are. Whether we're talking muslims, buddhists, mayans, Incas, or whatever the religion on the pacific and Indian ocean islands were called. Each and every one managed to destroy close to every last iota of written text they could get their hands on. Some, like the mayas and muslims, got quite far ... and then destroyed their progress. Even atheist states aren't innocent in this regard, as ancient athens at one time voted on the order to destroy every book that claimed objects sometimes move in a straight line (only circular trajectories were allowed). Likewise they voted several times to destroy mentions of particular parts of history.
The Christian world by contrast, even in the dark ages, was covered in Libraries containing much more than just the bible, and this was maintained by Christian monks. Even more unique amongst the world's religions : they actually copied non-christian works verbatim, even where they disagreed with canon. This was obviously mentioned in commentaries, but they didn't rewrite the books like muslims did (for example, so did hindus and buddhists). Some muslims go so far as to say that the version from muslim scolars from the middle ages are "really" the original versions.
Some western scholars hold that even the quran itself is such a very badly copied book, a copy of the bible, made in a language of the early companions of the prophet. These guys then proceeded to get nearly all of themselves killed in wars they started, resulting in the stupid fact that they didn't have anyone who spoke the original language (Arameic) the book was written down in. Then they transliterated, picking whatever word was the closest arabic word in a systematic manner, the result of which was written down. Some stories do indeed match word-for-word with ancient eastern bibles, but it is often hard to find these things, because they re-ordered the sentences (from long to short), and left >95% of them out entirely (which is why the quran is such a short and horribly unreadable book). See also, Christopher Hitchens.
Sadly, when it comes to religions, Christians are the top of the line. Which of course doesn't mean that they're particularly supportive of science, just that they can usually resist the apparently very strong human temptation to burn, kill or crucify anyone remotely suspected of having independent ideas.
Well, yes. But the hypothesis that on 1 Jan 1990 God has decreed that the temperature shall henceforth stay constant is still a better match than the IPCC's prediction for the last 20 years (by the extremely standard squared error method), as specified in the report they released in that year. I fully agree it's not a very realistic scenario, and I'm not proposing adopting that as a weather model. But that's not really the point. The point is that the IPCC's AR1 prediction is flat-out wrong. It predicted X (a fairly massive temperature increase), and Y (much less rise than predicted 1990-2000, barely any rise 2000-2010) happened. The basis for the Kyoto accord is bullshit.